Man, I can’t get enough of this stuff.
Something in me has always been fascinated with the place where solid and vapor meet. (Watching smoke in a sunny room is pretty groovy, too.) It has to do with how the atmosphere flows, I guess, and the revelatory aspect of the invisible made visible. The image below is cropped and blown up from a larger photo to get some detail on the white clouds streaming over the tree tops. They must have condensed right after the rain and snow: there’s a little white stuff at the top, above the yellow aspens.
Current flowing from left to right
Some version of this shot will probably end up on FotoFeed next week. I took so many great pictures in that last hour of light on Sunday… But speaking of this image, if you do take a look at the last few days of FotoFeed — say, today’s photo and then go back a few — you can actually map out and follow the cold, damp river of air that’s blowing from left to right by seeing where these low clouds are going. In fact, in yesterday’s picture, some of this same surface condensation is being whipped over the peak, where the wind velocity is much stronger.
I can do this all day, watch this motion. In the summer the wind blows clouds down along the tops of the Sangre de Cristos until they get to Llano Quemado and Picuris Peak beyond. Here the main current of air appears to form a giant eddy, where one can watch huge clouds slowly moving in what appear to be opposite directions at the same altitude. They’re really going in a spiral though, and I have sat outside transfixed, watching these same clouds evaporate rapidly and disappear before my eyes as they circle in the fierce sun and 10 percent humidity.
The ones above aren’t doing that, of course. That air is cold and wet.
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